Congressional Record, Volume 156 Issue 91 (Thursday, June 17, 2010)

[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 91 (Thursday, June 17, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H4625-H4631]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for
60 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, thank you.
I appreciate very much the privilege to be recognized to address you
here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this great
deliberative body that we have. I appreciate the gentleman from Utah
who so eloquently spoke in the previous period of time.
I have a number of things on my mind that I came here to impart to
you, Madam Speaker, and anyone that would like to overhear our
conversation. Maybe this would be a good day to solve a lot of the
problems that we have before us and just generally address this
situation. I won't go through all the history of the world to get here,
but I may have to refer once in a while back to the history of the
world to make a reference point so that we can understand what we're
doing now.
This is an America that has been built upon the foundation of a good
number of things--the pillars of American exceptionalism. Now, some of
these are pretty simple. They are in the Bill of Rights: freedom of
speech, religion, and the press; the freedom to assemble and petition
our government for redress of grievances, all in the First Amendment
there. Property rights that are clearly defined in the Fifth Amendment;
freedom from double jeopardy. Then we have a whole series of other
rights.
But there are a couple of things that we don't talk about very much
in this country, and, that is, if you would go to the USCIS stack of
flashcards, and these are glossies about, I suppose, 2\1/2\ inches by
about 5, like a deck of them. When we have legal immigrants that come
to the United States that are studying so that they can pass the
citizenship test and receive their naturalization to become an American
citizen, they study the flashcards, very much like students study the
flashcards in, say, math: 2 plus 2 is 4, 3 plus 3 is 6. I won't go on
any further, Madam Speaker, so I don't make a math error, but these
cards that test the applicants for American citizenship have a series
of questions on them and an answer on the other side.
There will be questions such as, who is the father of our country?
You snap it over and the other side of that card says George
Washington. You need to know that if you're going to be a citizen of
the United States of America. Who emancipated the slaves? Flip the card
over, Abraham Lincoln. Next question--actually, this is question No.
11: What is the economic system of the United States? Free enterprise
capitalism is on the other side of that card. I don't think it's
arguable. I don't think it's refutable. But neither do I believe that
the administration believes what I have just said. I don't think they
have endorsed free enterprise capitalism. I don't think they've been
active in it. A small, small percentage of this administration has
signed the front of the paycheck and handed that payroll check over to
one of their employees. I am one of the people that has done so. I have
started a business and created jobs and I have met payroll for, I
believe the number is 1440 consecutive weeks.
You learn some things doing that, Madam Speaker. You understand and
appreciate the free enterprise system. We know why people take risks.
People go to work so they can make some money. They punch the time
clock and they punch in and they punch out, and they get their paycheck
and the benefits package that comes with that job because they want to
feed their family. They want to have some walking-around money. They
want to save up for the future. They want to have the flexibility to go
and get some living in doing some things that cost a little money.
This is taking advantage of the liberties and freedoms that we have
here in the United States. That's getting a job and going to work.
That's contributing generally to the free enterprise system. But when
an entrepreneur comes up with an idea to start a business or buy an
existing business, maybe transform that business into something
different, a vehicle for them, that really launches our free enterprise
system.
We have seen success models of that across the history of America,
across the United States of America. We might think of the Carnegies,
for example, back in another era, or J.P. Morgan in another era, or we
can be

[[Page H4626]]

thinking also of some of the Rockefellers. Or in today's world, we can
think of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the founders, respectively, of
Microsoft and Apple. Yes, they made a lot of money, and there's not one
dime of it that I begrudge them because their creativity and their
discipline, their attitude, their hard work, yes, but their smart, hard
work has done a lot for all of us. Our lives are far better today
because we had creative people who injected ideas and stimulated this
economy; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being two of them. There are many
more out there in the dot-com industry.
There are also failures out there, if you define failure by starting
a business and watching it go broke; although, I think there are many
times there are lessons learned there that are built upon, and those
heretofore failures become successes. But my point is that we are a
Nation that has embraced free enterprise capitalism. It should not be
arguable here in the United States.
We should not have a knee-jerk reaction that we should go towards a
government takeover of the private sector in order to solve a temporary
economic problem. Our default mechanism should be to free enterprise,
to freedom, and we have to let some entities fail if we're going to
allow our economy and our Nation to succeed. That's the risk. You have
to, once in a while, let the child fall off the bicycle, because when
they get up, they'll be a lot better at it. And you have to, once in a
while, let people achieve and be rewarded for their successes to the
fullest extent, because that's what inspires more entrepreneurship,
more challenges, and more success.
When you think of the United States of America, and this is the
historical lesson now that goes back. We look at 1776 as our year; the
Fourth of July, 1776, as our year. Think of that time. What was going
on in that period of history? What was going on in the culture of
Western civilization?

{time} 1515

Well, let's see. Not only did the 13 original colonies declare their
independence from Great Britain, from the king, but that was the year
that Adam Smith published his great work called ``Wealth of Nations.''
My book, I believe, is 1,057 pages long, and you can read through there
carefully and learn what it's like to make pins and nails and how to
utilize the division of labor to get more efficiency, and everybody
benefits. Adam Smith had the industrial revolution figured out in 1776
at the beginning of the first signs of the dawn of the industrial
revolution.
We had here in the United States the free enterprise capitalism, part
of the culture. We had a Nation of shopkeepers and a Nation of small
farmers that were free to succeed or fail on their own merits or
demerits. And we know that some of our earlier Presidents had real
difficulty with their finances, Thomas Jefferson among them. George
Washington had some of those struggles as well. There were others that
had difficulties with their finances. It wasn't something that they
were handed something they didn't have to make work or something that
didn't require them to be a manager. Their management of their finances
and the production of their operations had a lot to do with their
successes or failures.
In 1776, Adam Smith touched a nerve and educated the marketplace of
Western civilization, and they began to embrace the idea of free
enterprise capitalism, division of the invisible hand managing our
economy rather than the king ordering it to be done or, in a later
century, the next century, Karl Marx directing that it all come out of
central command, from top down.
Adam Smith's vision was this, that if you have only one brand of
bread on the shelf and you have a set price for that loaf of bread, you
can take the price up well above what it's worth. If people are going
to eat bread, they will have to pay more than it might be costing, if
there's competition. As soon as company A is competed against by
company B, what can you use to get a market share? Well, you can bake a
loaf of bread that you sell a little cheaper. You can bake a loaf of
bread that's a little better loaf of bread. You can package it up a
little nicer or provide a little better service or provide it to be a
little fresher. Some of the things, cheaper, better, better
advertising, service, packaging, and maybe a little fresher. And when
you do that, if you can sell at a lower price a better quality product,
the invisible hand would come into that grocery store and instead of
paying $1 for a loaf of bread, buy that 95 cent loaf of bread that's a
little better bread than the $1 bread. Pretty soon, company B at 95
cents is outselling company A who's selling their bread for $1.
And so what happens? The quality of the bread for company A goes up,
the freshness goes up, the price goes down, and this competition goes
on day-by-day constantly, transaction-by-transaction, the invisible
hand making that selection of a brand of a loaf of bread or a gallon of
milk or a can of beans or a T-shirt or a pair of sneakers or a car on
the lot or a plane ticket on the Internet or any transaction that you
can think of that a consumer would use if there's competition out there
and the calculus of the consumer. Well, selection-by-selection, select
market shares and set the prices and provide for the production,
directions, and the availability of products because free enterprise
capitalism reacts. They have to compete so they react to market
demands.
That's just a few minutes to explain what that is, and I'd like to
have that time in the Oval Office to explain this also to the person
that sits behind that desk because I see a lot of signs that tell me
that there isn't a deep natural conviction that supports free
enterprise, and this includes the nationalization of three large
investment banks, AIG, the insurance company, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac,
General Motors, Chrysler, the entire student loan program in America,
and now the takeover of our own body, our skin, and everything inside
it called ObamaCare.
Then in the speech about how to deal with the gulf oil spill, which
is a disaster and a tragedy that I don't think we can point our finger
at an individual who's to blame at this point, we haven't found out yet
what caused it, but in that speech, the President raised the issue that
he would like to move forward on cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax.
Now, we have a financial reform bill that is in conference right now
that's being hammered out. I will add these up again, and I will take
this, Madam Speaker, to a percentage so that we have an understanding
of how much of the private sector of this economy has been swallowed up
by decisions made, beginning in the Bush administration, all of those
decisions supported wholly by candidate-then and now President Obama.
Three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General
Motors, Chrysler, now that totals to one-third of the private sector
activity as described by Professor Boyle at Arizona State University
some months ago. When you added to that 17\1/2\ percent of our economy,
which is underneath the--now the ownership, management or control of
this administration called ObamaCare, now we're up to 51 percent,
rounds to 18, remember, 33 and 18, 51 percent. The financial services
package, which looks like it's very difficult to block and most likely
to end up on the President's desk, as much as I would like to stand in
its way, represents by some accounts another 15 percent of our economy.
So now we're up to 66 percent of our economy swallowed up if the
financial package gets to the President's desk.
Behind that, cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax, a tax on everything that
moves in America. It takes energy to move anything. It takes energy for
me to raise my hand, so many calories burned up per pushup. I suppose
somebody knows that number, Madam Speaker. But some say that cap-and-
trade is about 8 percent of our economy. I think it's larger. I think
it grows into being larger. It may well start out at 8 percent. So 66
percent that we're at now, the total, and we add 8 percent, the cap-
and-trade. If the President is successful in what he would like to do,
we will have seen 74 percent of the private sector economy swallowed up
and being under the ownership, management or control of the Federal
Government, 74 percent of our economy. That leaves--bright math
students--26 percent of the economy left over.
The engine of our economic growth is free enterprise capitalism, this
little simple thing that you can't pass the

[[Page H4627]]

test to be naturalized as an American citizen without at least the risk
of having that being one of the questions on your test. We want
everybody in America to understand free enterprise capitalism is our
economic system that we have here in the United States, but our free
enterprise is being swallowed up. The margins that are left are 26
percent, if this falls in the way the President is driving it, and
we're going to expect that 26 percent to provide the taxes and the
growth and the economic foundation to support all of this government on
the other side.
Meanwhile, we're watching irresponsible spending out of this Congress
to the tune of trillions of dollars. Let me just say that I believe I
could pull out of the top of my head $2.34 trillion in irresponsible
spending that's taken place in about the last year-and-a-half or a
little more. That would be wrapped up in the $700 billion in TARP
spending, the $787 billion in the economic stimulus plan which 6
percent of Americans think works out for the positive, 96 percent of
Americans think it didn't work and better off if we hadn't done it.
There are other components out there with the Fed rolling out funds, et
cetera, that rolls it up to that number of $2.34 trillion.

And I listened to and submitted to debate after debate that came out
of this side of the aisle over the last several years of Democrats, and
many of them self-professed Blue Dog Democrats, that said we've got to
have PAYGO rules, we're going to be PAYGO, we're going to pay as we go.
If we have to increase spending in one area, we'll have to go find
someplace to pay for it by decreasing spending in another area. That's
a philosophy that I agree with and I endorse. In fact, I'd go a little
further than that if there's a way to do it.
But the Blue Dogs have essentially dropped out of sight. They're not
standing there fighting on a budget. They may be fighting behind the
scenes because what we're finding out is this Speaker is not going to
bring a budget to the floor of this Congress. Since we've had budget
rules that began in 1974 this Congress has always passed a budget,
always brought a budget to the floor. As difficult as it is to pass it,
it is a framework, a spending constraint, that at least you can point
to those line items in that budget and argue that an appropriations
bill that spends money beyond that breaks our budget, but if you don't
have a budget, any kind of irresponsible spending works just as good,
and that's what's going on.
There's not a conscience, there's not a challenge, there's not a
means to try to figure out how to get us back to a balanced budget.
There is no path to do that. In fact, the President has driven this.
He's advocated for trillions of dollars of spending. He has signed
trillions of dollars of spending. He has said that in order to grow out
of this to solve our economic problem we need people spending money,
and he is a Keynesian economist on steroids. This is a guy who didn't
see it Adam Smith's way.
John Maynard Keynes was the economist that believed that you could
take Federal money, the greenbacks, cash, and put it into the hands of
the American people and they would take it out and spend it, and that
would stimulate the economy, and you could grow out of an economic
crisis just by simply spending government money. Well, I've always
thought that that was a ridiculous proposal. I think you have to
produce things that have value and market them for a competitive price
and build your efficiencies. I believe this is an economy that's built
on production, not on consumption. And if that's all it was, we could
embrace John Maynard Keynes' idea who actually spoke and wrote about
how he would solve the economic problem in the United States this way.
Keynes said, I want to find an abandoned coal mine. He said, I can
solve all of the unemployment in America. I just go to an abandoned
coal mine and drill a whole series of holes into the ground in that
abandoned coal mine, and I would put American dollars, cash money, down
the holes, fill the holes up with cash, and fill the coal mine up with
garbage, garbage, fill the coal mine up with garbage, and then just
turn America's entrepreneurs loose. They would go to work digging up
that money through that garbage. That would give them jobs, that would
keep them busy, and they would have cash to spend, and they would go
out and spend it. That was Keynes.
It may have been tongue-in-cheek, in all fairness. I hope it was
tongue-in-cheek, but it accurately reflects Keynes' economic theory,
and the President of the United States told me and others a year ago
last February 10 that he believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost
his nerve and didn't spend enough money. If he had spent enough money,
he would have, according to the President, spent our way out of the
Great Depression and we wouldn't have had to wait for World War II to
come along to be the largest stimulus plan ever. It's pretty close to
verbatim.
So FDR lost his nerve in spending. Today's President has not lost his
nerve. He has spent money way beyond any previous President. I think
that the cumulative total of it all would be more debt and deficit that
has been accumulated by all the Presidents put together all the way
back to George Washington. Someone said that here on the floor. I'm not
going back to read the source of it. I expect it's true, and I think I
should have to verify it before I tell you I know it's true.
But huge debt that's been run up by this President and this Pelosi
House and the Reid Senate down that hallway without regard to how we
ever get back from it. And the argument was that we needed to get money
spent into the economy, the stimulus plan, remember $787 billion rolled
up, over $800 billion in reality. Now, they're coming back and asking
for another few dozen billion dollars, whatever that might be. Two
score and $10 billion perhaps is what their target money is to
stimulate the economy some more.
But the President said a year-and-a-half ago spend money, spend
money, spend money, that's what will help the economy. People are
hanging onto their dollars because they don't have confidence. You've
got to spend money.

{time} 1530

Some months later, the President said, No, now we're going to have to
be careful, we can't overspend. We're going to have to be frugal, as if
we could--one time borrowing a lot of money and giving it to people and
getting them to spend it was going to stimulate the economy and solve
the problem. And then, according to who, I don't know, the navel gazers
in the White House, then you shift gears, and at a certain point, you
spend less. But whenever you feel the urge to spend more, go ahead.
``If it feels good do it'' seems to be what's going on with the
economic strategy of the White House.
So now we have these multiple trillions of dollars, the interest of
which right now consumes 10 percent of our budget. The interest on
these deficits that are projected today under the proposals of the
President by the year 2020, 10 years from now, will not be 10 percent;
it will be 20 percent of our overall budget.
Now, can we understand what this means? When we start tapping into
that--it's the pie chart we're talking about here. A 10 percent slice
is our interest today; a 20 percent slice of the pie chart becomes the
interest in 2020; and if interest rates go up and double, you will see
an economic decline that's brought about because of higher interest
rates, and you will see a bigger chunk right away. If interest rates
double today, our 10 percent slice would be at least 20 percent, and
that could happen in a matter of a few weeks or months.
So this is serious business, passing this debt along to our children.
We need to figure out how to recover from where we are today. All of
this toothpaste can't be put back in the tube; some of it can. Many of
the things that have been passed and signed into law need to be
repealed right down to their roots. Much of the money that has been
spent is gone, we can't get it back, but we're going to have to figure
out how to service the debt; that means pay the interest and pay the
principal down and pay the principal off.
This Nation shouldn't be carrying debt, debt that meets or exceeds
that which we see in countries like Greece or Spain or Ireland or
Italy. The European Union threatens to collapse under the financial
stress that they have because they have loaned money; it's almost like
they're sitting at a poker

[[Page H4628]]

table playing for chips and writing each other IOUs around the table.
At some point, you have to pay for the drinks and the food that's
coming along. Those chickens are coming home to roost in Europe.
We don't need to be there in America. We're a different kind of
people. We have a unique vitality in our character, in our soul. One of
the things that is part of that vitality is that we've skimmed the
cream off of the crop of every donor civilization in the world.
Everybody that sent their immigrants to the United States, they didn't
go out and get the people that were sitting out there on the porch that
didn't go to work; these were the industrious ones. These were the
entrepreneurs, the creative ones, the ones that had a dream, that were
frustrated because they had the shackles of a dictator that kept them
from using freedom to grow their own lifetime success.
Can you imagine if you couldn't worship freely, if you couldn't go
out and get a job, if you couldn't start a business, if you couldn't
even put money in a bank and trust that you could go get it when you
needed it? If you couldn't trust the rule of law? If you had to think
that there was a different form of justice for one person because they
were connected better with government than another person, wouldn't you
look at America? Even though they advertise the streets are paved with
gold, some of them didn't realize that that was figurative, not
literal; some of them came here and were a little disappointed to find
out our streets aren't paved with gold. But in a way they are, Madam
Speaker, they're paved with gold because we have the rule of law. You
can pretty much count on the law treating you the same regardless of
who you are, what you look like, or what your particular net worth
might be or who you're connected to. Lady Justice is blind. If you
remember her standing there with her hands out holding the scales of
justice, weighing the justice with a blindfold on. In this country,
Lady Justice is blind, the rule of law has to apply, and we must defend
and uphold the rule of law.
You've got to give everybody an opportunity to compete in the
marketplace for a job or start a business, and we need to hold them
accountable to produce and earn and carry their own weight. We've
drifted over into a society now where--when my grandmother came here
over a century ago by now, she arrived in a meritocracy, where they
rewarded smart, hard work, and people could succeed without penalty. In
fact, when she walked across the floor of the great hall at Ellis
Island, she would have been one of those arriving immigrants where they
took a little hook and peeled her eyelids back to look and see if those
little white spots were in there to indicate an eye disease. They
looked people over and checked them to see if they were good physical
specimens. If they had a limp or a bad arm, or even if they came in and
they were obviously pregnant, they put them back on the ship and sent
them back to Europe.
And this isn't Steve King that is telling you these narratives,
except that these came directly from the park officer at Ellis Island
the day that she did the tour for us. About 2 percent of those that
arrived at Ellis Island got back on the ship, and they were sent back
to their home country because they didn't meet our standards. Even when
they met our standards, there wasn't a welfare program for them; they
either needed to have some family or some friends to take them in and
get them started, or it was simply that you have to survive on your
own. Go out and get a job, go to work, start a business. Offer yourself
to do anything, wait tables, sweep the floors, clean out the sewers,
grab a hammer, or whatever it might be, and go to work and help build
America. And they did.
But we got the dreamers. We got the passionate ones. We got the smart
ones that could understand what America was and is and is to become yet
beyond this point where we are today. And that vitality and that vigor
that beat in the hearts of the willing immigrants that came here
legally is a great big reason for American exceptionalism. It's almost
unwritten, it's almost unspoken about, but it is a characteristic that
is an essential component in American exceptionalism, coupled with free
enterprise, capitalism, and the rule of law and religious freedom, and
a moral society that is built on Judeo-Christian values--yes, that's
our history and our culture and our heritage. It's our modern reality,
too, perhaps to a smaller degree, but the core of the character of who
we are is based on our religious faith.
And so we have a rule of law and a people that respect God's laws, so
you don't need as many law enforcement officers. We can use our labor
to produce more that has value because we pay fewer people to put on a
badge and a gun and go try to control folks that are not willing to
abide by the law. It's another one of the reasons why America has risen
up and another one of the reasons why we've been more successful.
And so the vigor that we are in America is being challenged today.
Two hundred years ago, you had free enterprise capitalism; you had
these freedoms. And by the way, it was the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution. We had the transfer of the Age of Enlightenment that
arrived here in the new world at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
And remember that from the Greeks, we got the Age of Reason, which
flowed from Europe. It had to go over to Ireland where the Irish could
save civilization by being the scribes that actually copied and
preserved the classics that came from Greek and Roman literature. We
know something about the Greeks and the Romans because the Irish monks
and scribes made sure that they gathered all of that data and
reproduced it, copied it over, and stored and saved it during the Dark
Ages, when nothing happened.

Madam Speaker, I sometimes tease my family on the Irish side of the
family--which actually seems to be my wife and my side--I ask, what is
it that the Irish are so proud about? What is good about being Irish?
Why is it that on St. Patrick's Day, everybody's Irish? They didn't
have very many good answers for me, and so I would tease them a little
bit and say, well, I know what they did. I know what the Irish did that
was unique that no one else did. A people that, according to Freud,
couldn't be psychoanalyzed, but the Irish did something nobody else
did. They're the only ones on the globe to record history during the
Dark Ages when nothing happened. Now that diminishes their
contribution.
Their contribution is great because we received, through their
contribution of being the monks and the scribes and collecting that
data and reproducing it and storing it and saving it from the
barbarians who burned the books and burned the writings when they
could, they saved the knowledge base that came out of Greek and Roman
civilization. That knowledge base is rooted back--out of the Greeks is
the Age of Reason, the foundations for our science and our technology
today, the theorem, the hypothesis, the axiom, the list of those Greek
foundational thoughts where Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and others
sat around in the square in Athens in their togas and analyzed and used
the version of knowledge that they had to test each other's ability to
be logical and to be able to reason. That foundation of reasoning was
preserved by the Irish.
And as they deployed back across Europe with that message, they
actually taught Western Civilization how to think again, how to think
beyond our emotions and our reactions, and how to take empirical data
and crunch that data and turn it into something that could follow a
logical thought and we could act and react according to actual facts
rather than the high blood of emotion. It seemed like an odd thing for
the Irish to contribute, to overcome your emotions and use reason, but
they did.
And from the Romans--and thanks again to the Irish scribes--we had
the Roman rule of law. Roman law had spread over most of Western
Europe. It spread through Great Britain, through England, and it spread
into Ireland. Even though the Irish had been conquered a number of
times, they never really changed their character very much, but they
helped preserve Roman law, which was reestablished in England as old
English common law. So the common law that we use today to evaluate--
and the case law that's being decided by our courts across this land is
rooted back in old English common law, which is rooted back in Roman
law. And the Age of Reason from Greece arrived, coming the same way,

[[Page H4629]]

but arrived here in the new world with the English-speaking side of the
Age of Enlightenment.
I also have to couple with that, in these foundations for American
greatness, Madam Speaker, two more very profound things that took
place: The birth of Christ, where his teachings transformed the
civilized world as we knew it then. And we know that faith and those
core values are in our culture and our civilization today. And the
Catholic Church might not have been--the Roman and Eastern Orthodox,
but the Roman Catholic Church that is today might not be and likely
would not be what it is today if it had not been for the Protestant
Reformation, from Martin Luther, who taught us the Protestant work
ethic. And the Catholics competed very well with that in this country.
So I couple the Age of Reason with the Roman law, and pass that over
to Ireland and spread it back across all of Western Europe. And we have
the Age of Enlightenment, which began in France, but the sister to it
was the English-speaking side of it in England where free enterprise
capitalism emerged and came to this country at the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution, arriving in a country that had low or no
taxation, no regulation, unlimited natural resources as far as they
could comprehend them at the time, a continent to settle from sea to
shining sea, and a vision of manifest destiny for this country.
And look what's been accomplished in this giant petri dish of freedom
and liberty with the components in that giant petri dish that I've
talked about. We have become the unchallenged greatest Nation in the
world with a vigor and a vitality and a character all our own.
There is something unique about being an American, we need to
understand that; it's not something to apologize for. We have an extra
blessing here, and that comes about because of the things that I've
talked about and others that I haven't mentioned yet tonight. We have
an extra blessing, an extra vigor.

{time} 1545

There is something about us. Maybe there is a little bit of an
American attitude. You know, I don't know. It may be Muhammad Ali who
said, If you can do it, it ain't bragging. We should be ebullient of
our character and of the things that we do. We should also have
confidence.
I have a constituent who has since passed away, who was a man of high
values and faith and character--World War II veteran Arrie Oliver. I
got to know him well. I interviewed him on his World War II experience
in a video that, I believe, we have now stored over at the archives in
the Library of Congress. He served in Germany in World War II for the
United States Army.
At the end of the invasion of Berlin, he was there in the American
sector where he was taken captive by the Russians. The Russians put him
and three others into their Russian prisoner of war camp, American
soldiers. They had to eat, and they had to peel the potatoes for the
Russian soldiers. Then they got to eat the dirty potato peelings while
the potatoes went to the Russian soldiers. There were some stories
there that told me how poorly he was treated.
I said to him, Tell me the circumstances by which you were taken
captive.
He said, Well, you know, the war was over. The German soldiers were
gone. We were walking down the street in Berlin, and the Russians came
and picked us up and arrested us. This was he and three others.
As he told the story, he said that the Russians claimed that there
were women in one of the adjacent houses and that no soldier was to go
near the women. Well, that wouldn't be the history of the Russian
soldier, or of the American for that matter, but that was the pretense
for picking them up. He pointed out that they were all in civilian
clothes.
So I asked, How did the Russians know you were American enough to
pull you over and arrest you?
Now, I thought he might say it was because of our clothes. I thought
he was going to say it was because of the uniform, actually, but his
answer was really interesting.
It was, Well, they knew us by our walk.
They know American soldiers, even from a distance, because of the way
we walk, the way we carry ourselves. When you think about that, you
know, if you see a shadow of a bird hopping out on the grass, you know
that a robin hops differently from some other kind of a bird. If you
watch them in flight, you see their gait, and you know. Yet you would
think that human beings would have a similar gait. Americans have a
distinct gait about the way we handle ourselves and especially during
that period of time when America had complete confidence in everything
that we were doing.
So there is something unique about being an American, and we need to
keep these precious gifts that we have. We've got to do our work. We've
got to take our responsibility. We've got to bring this country away
from the welfare state that we have become. We've got to hold people
accountable with the rule of law and apply the law equally to everyone
regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin or any other privilege
that there might be--the O.J. version of justice, as we see it, if you
juxtapose the criminal case versus the civil.
I think most of America knows the facts of what happened; but to me,
there appeared to be a different version of justice for O.J. Simpson in
the criminal case than he might have gotten if he hadn't had the money,
the notoriety or the fame as compared to the civil case where he pretty
much lost everything that he had.
I think there was justice delivered at least once there, Madam
Speaker.
So we want equal justice under the law. We want all of these
foundations, these pillars of American exceptionalism, refurbished and
built back up again because America is not done. We've not reached the
apex of our flight. Even though we may have had the malaise II speech a
couple of nights ago, that's not the American spirit. We don't
apologize for who we are, nor do we back up from people who challenge
us.
We look down at the Gulf of Mexico, and we see an environmental
disaster, a mess down there. It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy
especially for the people who live in that gulf area and any place that
that oil might drift. Boy, do we all feel bad, especially for those in
Louisiana and beyond, but something went wrong 5,000 feet below the
surface of the ocean and 18,000 feet below that which caused that well
to blow out.
The spill that is coming now will be stopped one day. Going into last
weekend, they were down to 13,800 feet with their relief well, and if
they hit the column right, they will be able to shut off the leakage in
that well. They are drilling day and night. There is no question about
that. I expect they're drilling two holes simultaneously with the
Discovery Enterprise, which is the drill ship that is sitting there to
drill the relief wells that they're doing. They'll get it shut off.
There is a lot of oil out there on the surface, and a lot has drifted
into the marshlands and onto the beaches. We will get it cleaned up. I
don't know how long it will take, nor what it will look like. But I do
know this, that in 1979 there was a massive spill of an oil well, a
blow-out down off the Yucatan Peninsula. That well spilled about three-
and-a-third million gallons of oil. Now, as of a few days ago, the
calculus was about one-and-a-quarter million gallons of oil that had
come out of this hole down off the gulf. Now we're seeing numbers that
are way beyond that, and no one knows who to believe, whether it's BP
or the government or somebody who is looking at those numbers.
Though, I can tell you this: it has been a decade or two since people
have worried about going down to the Yucatan Peninsula because of that
oil leak. They've gotten it cleaned up. The impact of it has been
minimized dramatically. We will get Louisiana cleaned up. We will get
our coasts cleaned up. We will look back on this time.
What I'm interested in is stopping the leak and, yes, in cleaning up
the mess. I want to bring every ship in here that can go out there and
set up a sweep system, and I don't see any reason for the President not
to suspend the Jones Act and to go around and do a mea culpa to America
and bring in every ship we can to recover as much oil as possible off
the surface of the

[[Page H4630]]

ocean rather than having to vacuum it up out of the wetlands and to
clean it and take it out of the sand on our beaches. We need to get it
while it's on the surface of the water, and that means surrounding the
oil slick in the plume and starting to herd that back in.
Maybe you'll remember the comedy routine that Emmett Kelly did, the
circus clown, where he went out--and many of us have seen the movie--
and he didn't know what his show was going to be or what he was going
to do. He walked out into the spotlight under the big top at the
circus, and he took a broom, and he began to sweep the edge of the
spotlight in. The person running the spotlight figured out what was
going on, and he cut a cardboard cutout, and put it over the light, way
up on top of the big top, and he began to shrink that light up on the
inside where it was emitted, and he shrunk it as Emmett Kelly swept the
circle. When it was done, they were able to coordinate where he swept
the light under the rug and eliminated it.
That's what we need to do with this oil spill. We need to take that
oil spill and start on the outside and start bringing that together and
bring enough rigs in so we can get it done and so we can recover the
oil that can be recovered from the surface. We need to take it off of
the surface of the ocean. If we don't have every ship there, doing that
that we can do now, we need to bring them.
If the Jones Act stands in the way, the White House, of course, is
going to be protective. They're less inclined than President Bush to
waive the Jones Act. I think there needs to be a powerful call for the
President of the United States to waive the Jones Act.
So we have some things to do to fix up America--free enterprise,
lower taxes, lower regulations, and more inspiration for people to have
opportunities to go out and earn, save, invest, and succeed. People
need to be held accountable for their actions. People need to be
rewarded for the things that they do well and punished for the things
that they do bad. That's the America we need to be in. Today, we are in
a welfare state. It is a fact.
This is a report that was done by Robert Rector of the Heritage
Foundation. He studied families, families of four, that were headed by
high school dropouts. This is without regard to their immigration
status. So they could have been legal, illegal, natural born or
naturalized; but they were high school dropouts. They would, on
average, draw down $32,000 a year in public benefits--a family of four,
headed by a high school dropout. They would on average pay $9,000 a
year in taxes. The difference to the dollar, I remember, is $22,449 a
year as the net cost to a taxpayer for a household headed by a high
school dropout, because, at their skill levels, no matter how hard they
work, they can't earn enough money to sustain themselves in this
society.
This is a society that we've built. We have poured millions of people
into this country illegally who have suppressed the wages of the lower
skilled so that the high school dropouts can't find places to punch the
clock to earn enough money so that they don't have to go on some type
of public assistance. There will be food stamps there. There will be a
rent subsidy. There will be a heat subsidy. There will be at least 69
other Federal programs. We thought that we reformed welfare here in the
mid-1990s. It only brought things to a plateau. Then the welfare
spending started to grow again.
So we are a dependency society. The President of the United States
and the members of his party know full well that expanding the
dependency class in America expands their political base. They are
cynically growing the dependency class in America so that they have a
stronger political foundation so that they can stay in power--so that
the elitists can stay in power.
Well, I happen to have a good friend on the floor of the House right
now who is anything but an elitist, unless there happens to be some
kind of company that would be made up of smart people, well-educated
judges from Texas who will stand and fight, who are naturally born with
a spine, who have been refurbished by education and life's experiences
and, hopefully, a little bit by the friendship of mine.
So I offer as much time as may be consumed by the gentleman of Texas,
Judge Gohmert.
Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I thank my friend from Iowa so much. In fact, I
had some dear friends--and I, actually, have them here present--one
whom my wife and I taught in Sunday school 20 years or so ago and who
is here with her mom. Anyway, she was saying she really enjoyed Steve
King's Special Orders, and so I thought I might pass that on.
I also had heard my friend mention the Jones Act and how President
Bush was able to suspend it. It's interesting, when you put things in
perspective, how sometimes they appear different. Back at the time that
Hurricane Katrina hit, some people thought he waited too long.
Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. On September 1, President
Bush suspended the Jones Act so foreign ships could come in and help.
They helped put people up. They helped bring things that people could
use to help clean up. So there was Katrina on August 29. On September
1, he suspended it through September 19. I know there are some who say,
well, it probably takes a lot of things. Actually, it has to be signed
off on by Customs and Border Protection, by the Department of Energy
and by the Maritime Administration.
But guess what? Those are all White House appointments, so it's just
getting the people who work for him to sign on. That's no big deal.
Apparently, the Netherlands offered within a few days of the
disaster, of the big blow-out, to bring in equipment, to dredge up and
set up, and to create barrier islands. Yet this administration said,
No, thank you. Not only didn't he suspend the Jones Act. He said, No,
thank you, and sent them on their way. No, we don't want you coming
over here.
The truth is the Jones Act would be so easy to suspend. Back during
these past months, it would have been so easy to suspend. All you'd
have to do is to make one phone call; get your staff to have DOE,
Customs and Border Protection, and Maritime sign off. Then they could
bring it to you, and you could have it right there on the golf course
so that when you'd finish the ninth green putting, you could just sign
off on suspending the Jones Act before you'd tee off on the tenth tee.
It would be that easy to do.
In the meantime, if that had been done early on when the Netherlands
and England and others volunteered, it would have meant the saving of
the livelihoods of thousands upon thousands of people on the gulf
coast. It would have meant the saving of wildlife all through those
marshes where oil is getting up in there. It would have been a terrific
and a tremendous help had they been willing to just tell the unions,
Look, we know you don't want the Jones Act suspended. It won't be for
long, but we're talking about saving countless lives of wildlife in the
area as well as the livelihoods of so many.
I don't know if my friend from Iowa has heard, but I read here on the
floor an article regarding British Petroleum's relationship with the
global warming bill. It makes sense why they would have waited so long
to jump on BP, to get mad at them and to say, We've got our feet on
their neck, and all this stuff, because it turns out that BP was the
one Big Oil company that was signing on to all the global warming
stuff.
I'm sorry. I say ``global warming,'' but we know, since apparently
the planet has started cooling, they've changed the name and have said,
Please call it ``climate change,'' because it doesn't do to be pushing
global warming bills when it turns out the world may be cooling, as
South Africa found out this week with the snow down there.

{time} 1600

But, anyway, turns out that on April 22, Senator John Kerry, Democrat
from Massachusetts, was on the phone with allies in his push for
climate legislation and telling them he was rolling out the bill that
very day with three oil companies, including British Petroleum. They
were supporting him on his climate change, global warming bill, and
they were supporting the White House. And so, of course, they were
reluctant to jump on the oil company that was being such a big help to
them. But what we found is once they saw that the United States was
angry and

[[Page H4631]]

that this was going to be nothing but trouble, well, they were willing
to throw their friends under the bus and then talk about boots on their
throat and wanting to kick some rear ends.
We had a hearing today in our Natural Resources Committee and we had
the new Acting Director of Minerals Management Service. We had the new
Acting Inspector General of the Department of the Interior, and I was
asking that, since we'd had hearings a few years ago on why the price
adjustment language was pulled out of the offshore leases in 1998 and
1999--this was a few years ago, the prior Inspector General--the
Inspector General said, Well, we can't get to the bottom of why the
price adjustment language was pulled out, but clearly, at the time, it
had cost our country hundreds of millions--and I'm informed now that
that's billions and billions of dollars--that should have gone as
revenue from the offshore rigs but has gone into the pockets of some of
the big oil companies that executed those lists in 1998-1999. And it
turns out, the Inspector General said, But I haven't been able to
question the two people with the most information--because they could
probably explain this--because they're no longer with the government.
And I said, Well, where are they?
They're not with the government.
Well, why can't you call them?
They're not with the government.
When you're talking about hundreds of millions and now billions of
dollars, you would think they would want to know their version of what
happened. Because if there's billions and billions of dollars that have
gone to Big Oil that should have gone in our Federal Treasury because
it should have been royalty if these people had not pulled that
language out of those leases, then you would figure somebody would want
to know if they got something in return for that. What made you pull
that language? Because the best we could tell from hearing a few years
ago, it appeared they were given information that, Look, the language
is not in here on price adjustment. Don't you want that in there? And
they never talked to them. They weren't with the government anymore.
Well, it turns out one of the two had gone to work for a company--
perhaps you've heard of them--called British Petroleum. Went there in
2001, when the Clinton administration left, and served in different
positions; one as director of British Petroleum Shipping Limited in
London, vice president for British Petroleum North America in L.A., and
also one other position with BP before she came back.
So I asked the Acting Inspector General, Now that we have found out
that Ms. Baca is back with the Interior Department, now you surely have
asked her why that language was pulled out. What did she say?
Oh, I didn't know she was part of any of that.
And what struck me, and call me cynical, but we found the press
release from Interior, June of 2009. How ironic. That's 10 years after
the 1998-1999 leases during the Clinton administration had that
language pulled out. Ten years later, she comes out from British
Petroleum and goes to work for the Interior Department for Minerals
Management. It's really interesting because, well, 10 years. That
always rings a bill. Oh, yeah. Unless it's murder, the statute of
limitations is normally a maximum of 10 years, unless anything.
So that's probably good news if there was anything that went wrong
back there, that was done that shouldn't have been done. Ten years.
So just answer the question. Why did you pull that language out
before you went to work for British Petroleum and helped big oil
companies make so much money? So that's a matter of concern, continues
to be a matter of concern.
I did ask the Acting Director of MMS, since we know that the only
entity within Minerals Management that is allowed to be unionized is
the offshore inspectors, I asked, Now, we know you're dividing MMS up
into three groups, three parts. The prior Director had indicated that
she didn't know if they might all unionize or not, didn't really know.
So I asked the new Acting Director. He didn't know. That may happen.
Now, there's only one little part of MMS that's unionized--the offshore
inspectors. Now they may unionize all of those, and they'll have three
different agencies to do it with. So that was interesting to find out
today.
And when I asked if he thought it was a good idea that a father and
son team were the last two inspectors to go out to Deepwater Horizon
before the blowout, he said he didn't seem to see anything wrong with
it being a father and son. I'm going, This is your check and balance.
This is what we were told. This ensures that both inspectors are doing
their job, because they know the other is watching them and will report
them if they don't do their job. And he didn't have a problem with that
being father and son, didn't see that that was a problem.
I'm telling you, Mr. Speaker, when the heads of these agencies don't
see a father and son as a problem being the last two inspectors to go
to Deepwater Horizon and they are their own checks and balances to make
sure that those inspections are properly done, we've got a problem. And
it's not British Petroleum. They're one problem, and they need to be
dealt with--and should be. Because we've already seen the
administration now willing to throw their good friends under the bus.
But we do need to clean up this cozy relationship that the President's
talked about and that he helped create in the Minerals Management
Service.
I yield to my friend from Iowa.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
I am standing here thinking that I started down this subject matter,
and a statement that I needed to make was this: I'm looking forward to
the interception of the hole in the relief wells that are being drilled
down almost 14,000 feet, just going into last weekend when I last went
back and checked, so I presume that they are approaching their goal.
But it's very difficult to thread that needle and be 4 miles away and
hit that. It's a very difficult thing to do. But when they do get it
done, when they cap this well off and get the relief well drilled and
successfully seal this off, doing what they actually did in 1979 when
they had that huge oil spill when they had the blowout in the well off
the Yucatan Peninsula down in southern Mexico, when they shut that off,
then I expect--and I haven't had a conversation with anybody in BP or
anybody that's more knowledgeable than me, but I expect then we will be
able to go down with robotics and cut the casing off and recover the
blowout preventer. If that can come, if we can bring the blowout
preventer up to the surface and then test that BOP, at that point we
will at least be able to have a more effective theory on what went
wrong. That's what I am interested in more than anything else.
I want the well shut off. I want it cleaned up. But I want to know
what went wrong. And the President has frozen and issued an order to
stop all drilling offshore for 6 months. Even if we find out what went
wrong and find out it was human error, mechanical error, they still
seem to be determined that they're going to crush the economy in that
part of the country.
The economic damage of oil drifting to shore is a heavy load
economically, and environmentally it takes a long time to recover, but
also the economic damage of shutting off all of those jobs that are
supported by the drilling is a painful thing to watch that kind of
judgment from the President of the United States.
Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge that we must have run out of time. For
that cause, I will be happy to yield back.

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